completed· child-protection· WASH

Childcare and women’s economic engagement: evidence gathering and dissemination

This Research Support Project (RSP) seeks to enhance the knowledge base on the interactions between women’s paid and unpaid work through two complementary activities. First, it will consolidate evidence from a four- country study (India, Nepal, Tanzania and Rwanda) supported under the Growth and Economic Opportunities for Women (GrOW) program on how women’s child care responsibilities interact with their economic prospects. Second, it will foster policy dialogue on ways to support women achieve better balance between paid and unpaid work. The GrOW project, which was successfully completed, was instrumental in highlighting women’s daily struggle to balance unpaid care and paid work, often leading to depletion of their physical and emotional capacities, and negatively impacting on their children. This research adopted a broad definition of care to include direct care of people as well as indirect household tasks such as care of animals, and collection of fuel and water. While this approach was valuable in understanding the social organization of care, disaggregating the various care tasks is important to provide the basis for targeted policy action. This RSP aims to fill this gap by analyzing the data to understand the difference in the extent and type of depletion that women face because of direct care of people, and the indirect care tasks. The resulting working paper and policy brief will shed light on the extent to which provision of childcare facilities can facilitate women’s engagement in the paid labour force, and thereby assess their importance as a policy solution across various country contexts.